Some people really identify with their cars. An auto is not just a means for getting from point A to point B. It can be a statement, sometimes a status symbol.

Kermie II took one for the team.

Drive a hybrid? You obviously care about the environment. You probably hug trees in your spare time. Drive a Hummer? Maybe you want to appear macho. You probably crush beer cans on your forehead in your spare time (my personal bias is showing here; no actual offense is intended to any beer-can crushers, Hummer drivers, or otherwise macho individuals).

As for me, I drive a 2007 Ford Focus ZX3. I’m on my third ZX3. For those of you who don’t have a subscription to AutoTrader, the ZX3 isn’t as sporty as those catchy letters and numbers might imply. It’s a two-door hatchback. Edmunds.com tells us that this ’07 economy car is “several steps behind the class leaders” but its “fun-to-drive character could still make it an acceptable choice for budget-minded enthusiasts and commuters.”

Yawn! But that’s me, budget-minded. Not the status that I aspire to being labeled with. But to me, my car isn’t a status symbol. It’s a part of the family.

I got my first ZX3 in 2000 when they first came out. I thought it was one of the ugliest cars I’d seen, but my husband liked the 0% financing that Ford was offering, so we bought it with the understanding that I would only drive it while wearing a paper bag over my head.

My feelings about that changed rather suddenly one day when I dropped my daughter off at school and one of the junior high school boys asked – with obvious awe and admiration in his voice – “Wow! Is that your car?” Yep! You betcha. That’s my car. The paper sack came off, for good.

Since the car was green and was a little “puddle jumper” compared to other behemoths we’d been driving, we named it Kermie after Kermit the Frog of Muppet fame. Kermie served our family well, until one day my oldest daughter decided to take up cello playing. Alas, Kermie couldn’t hold me, two daughters, and a cello for the daily commute to and from school. With a tear in my eye, I traded Kermie in on an SUV, my status statement there being, “Hey, my daughter plays the cello. Take that and move over, all you piccolo piping pipsqueaks!”

The cello playing didn’t last long, and it was a happy day when I traded the gas-guzzling SUV in for my second ZX3, this one a red ’07. Kermie II couldn’t replace Kermie I, of course, but it landed a place in my heart nonetheless. I vowed that this would be the car I would drive forever, until the end of barbed wire and duct tape. Last May I proudly made my final payment on the car (thank you Ford for yet another 0% interest loan). Life was good.

Last Tuesday, I got T-boned in an intersection while driving Kermie II. Thankfully the driver of the other vehicle was uninjured, and my injuries will eventually clear up. That’s the important stuff. But sadly, poor Kermie II was a goner. It’s on its way to totaled-vehicle heaven.

While waiting for the final verdict on whether my car was going to be totaled (although it seemed obvious to me when the front of the car is facing north and the rear is heading northwest), I went scouring online to find a suitable replacement. And what should I find? A 2007 Ford Focus ZX3!

Kermie III is gray, automatic (unlike its predecessors), and - best of all – has side air bags, which have suddenly become an important selling point for me. And it already feels like part of the family.

As with Kermie II, I hope that Kermie III will be the car I grow old with. And if I take up cello, I will buy one with a retractable neck. Do they make those? They should. Otherwise, there’s really nothing wrong with the piccolo.

Here's another look back at life 20 years ago. From an article published in August of 1992:

Welcome to the Neighborhood

Image courtesy of digitalart at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It was a Saturday afternoon and we had been in our new house one full week. Cardboard moving boxes still clogged the rooms, spewing out assorted junk through which we sifted as schedules allowed, scratching our heads and wondering exactly why it was we kept lugging these useless items around with us when we hadn’t used them in the last five years.

While busily engaged in this laborious tedium of unpacking and head-scratching, we heard the doorbell ring. After locating the front door (“I think it’s behind that tall ‘Allied Vans’ box with the fake nose and glasses poking out”) my husband negotiated the obstacle-laden living room in a splendid impersonation of O.J. Simpson jumping hurdles at an international airport. Vaulting the stuffed bobcat, skimming over my beloved art deco lamp, and leaping over the crosscut saw which bears a hand-painted Warholian rendition of some tri-color mountain range, my husband opened the door to be greeted by a warm blackberry cobbler.Our neighbors one-street-over-and-two-doors-down had stopped by to welcome us with a home baked dessert made from berries picked fresh that morning. What a thoughtful gesture, and what an unexpected one in an era when social amenities requiring any real effort are becoming nearly extinct. With four moves in five years, this was the first time we had actually been welcomed into a neighborhood in any tangible form.Well, okay, there was one man a couple of moves ago who came next door when he saw the moving van in our driveway and shook my husband’s hand and said, “Welcome to the neighborhood.” But that doesn’t really count. Sure, it was a nice gesture, and it did take some effort to come over to personally greet us. The only problem was that that was the house we were moving out of – not into – and we had been living next door to this man for almost eleven months by then. I guess he didn’t recognize my husband without the fence between them. Neighborliness is, of course, a two way street, and although I am often guilty of negligence (and sometimes even manslaughter) of proper manners and societal protocol, my mother did manage to instill in me a few nuggets of propriety. One of them being: you never return a dish empty.

If you can successfully boil water, then you are overqualified to comprehend the utter despair I feel when faced with an empty dish – a dish that I am expected to fill with something edible. You see, when I should have been sitting in Mrs. Ramey’s home economics class learning to measure ingredients, I was instead perched on a stool in the shop building watching Mr. Moon demonstrate the finer points of disassembling a lawn mower engine.To this day I’m not sure how much a “pinch” of salt is; and when a recipe calls for a cup of water, I never know if they mean a heaping cup or just a level one. Given my shortcomings in the kitchen, I thought perhaps it would be socially acceptable to return the dish empty, and in lieu of poisoning our generous neighbors with well-intentioned burnt goods, I could offer to tear apart their lawn mower engine. Unfortunately, I never learned to put the darn things back together again, so my mechanical abilities would probably go as equally unappreciated as my culinary skills. After staring prolongedly and futilely at the empty eight by eight inch baking dish for some spark of inspiration, I finally rummaged through the moving boxes to find my recipe books. I have about a half-dozen of them. The titles tend to include either the word “quick” or the word “easy” in them. But, alas, I possess no recipe book entitled “Quick and Easy Recipes for an Eight by Eight Inch Baking Dish,” so I was out of luck.

I finally settled on a recipe for brownies which I am baking in my 9 x 13 inch dish. While they are cooling on the rack, I’ll head out to the garage to find my chisel and sledge hammer so I can cut the brownies up and transfer them to the neighbors’ dish. I figure depending on the outcome, I can either tell my neighbors I have made charcoal squares (they may have household purposes, you know), or chocolate-flavored lawn mower engine gaskets.And for everyone’s sake, I hope we won’t be moving again soon. # # #

Keeping one's nose to the grindstone can be hazardous to one's health.

“Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.” ~ Epicurus"He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.” ~ Lao Tzu I've been seeing a trend lately where blogging gurus keep urging people to constantly push the envelope of achievement. Entrepreneur and author Seth Godin wrote in a recent blog post about “creating a culture where there’s an urgency to improve.” I haven’t read much of his stuff, but I seem to recall him talking about how it’s not enough to just show up to work and do your job. You need to innovate, go above and beyond the expectations, take risks… because if you’re “just” doing your job, you’re not an asset to your company. I appreciate the value in striving for improvement, but when it becomes artificially “urgent,” that’s when my stomach starts to churn and I start to wonder about where we are headed. Bigger, better, faster, stronger, richer, newer… when does anything ever become enough? And if nothing is ever good enough, when will we ever find contentment?

Contentment seems at times to be equated with laziness, but that’s not the case. Dictionary.com tells us that contentment means “satisfaction; ease of mind.” My stomach likes that concept much better. I can do my job, do it well, and be satisfied with the results. I can even be innovative without being pressured with an “urgency” that tells me what I am doing is not enough.

I was listening to a recording that is part of a writing course for bloggers, and the speaker indicated that if we are not writing something worth disagreeing with, then we’re not writing anything worth reading at all. If the speaker was trying to prove his point, it worked, because I strongly disagree with what he said.

I don’t believe my writing has to be “urgent.” I don’t have to be controversial. I don’t have to push you to go out and move mountains. My hope is that my words might give you some levity at times, may inspire you at times, and may even help you feel some contentment with life. If I am accomplishing that, then I am content, because to me, that is enough.

I shared a link online the other day to my post Sound Waves in Outer Space, and I indicated that the post was about “dusting, my cats, [and] why I blog.” Someone wrote in that she had misread one of the commas and had for a moment thought that my post was about “dusting my cats.” Never one to disappoint, I decided, well why not write about dusting my cats? Not that I’ve ever done it. But come to think of it, it just might be easier than trying to vacuum clean them. And while I’ve never actually dusted my cats, I have on occasion mistaken my feather duster for one of my cats.

Look at the photos below and see for yourself. It’s an honest mistake that anyone could make. And I figured out the error fairly quickly. The duster wouldn’t eat no matter how many times I put the food dish in front of it, and the cat was way better at sweeping the furniture clean.

I labeled the photos just in case you can’t tell the difference, either.

Feather Duster

Cat

I had another experience with cat misidentification many years ago. I had two sibling cats that were half-Persians. They had beautiful soft smoky-blue fur, but they didn’t have the smooshed faces of a typical Persian kitty. I was twenty-something, reckless and didn’t have anything worth stealing, so I would leave the kitchen window open when I went out so the cats could come and go as they pleased. I came home one day after grocery shopping and as I was preparing to put the groceries away, I peeked around the corner into the living room to see if the cats were in the apartment. Sure enough, I saw a gray form curled up on the living room floor. I couldn’t tell which cat it was – Bonnie or Clyde – but I greeted it and tried to entice it into the kitchen with me. The form didn’t move.

Growing concerned, I set the groceries down and, fearing the worst, made my way into the living room to see what was the matter. There lying on my living room carpet was the hugest rat I’ve ever seen. Literally the size of my cats! Thankfully dead.

I couldn’t believe that I’d actually been talking to that horrific thing. Cajoling it even. I mean, who cajoles a 12-pound feral rat? I couldn’t figure out whether the cats had killed it and dragged it inside (it would have taken both of them working in tandem), or whether the thing came in on its own steam and then met its demise once inside. In the end, it didn’t really matter, I suppose. I was just glad it was dead. I can’t remember if it was that incident or the discovery of bats coming through the window that led me to finally stop leaving the kitchen window open. These days I still don’t have anything worth stealing, but I keep my window shut tight. If the cats want out, they have to pantomime their needs until I figure it out. It pays off for them, though. With all that practice, they can now beat me at charades almost every time.

“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is.”~ Ellen DeGeneresSo, I kind of flunked out of physical therapy. I’m told that’s what happens when you don’t do your homework. I just couldn’t get enthused about tying my foot to the leg of my coffee table with a red stretchy band and pulling every which way with my ankle. After all, my ultimate goal is to be able to walk without a limp someday, not to learn to drag my coffee table around like a prisoner’s ball and chain.

Perhaps I was being too literal, but I decided that if I want to improve my walking, maybe the thing to do is just that… walking. I canceled my PT appointments and began taking daily jaunts around the block. I started out small, making progressively larger loops around my neighborhood, going however far felt right on any given day.

It worked really well for the first few days. It was warm(ish) and sunny and there was lots to see in the neighborhood. It felt refreshing to get out of the house and move about, untethered from the coffee table (it wouldn’t fit through the door anyway). Then it rained. Certain that I would melt if I sallied forth into the drizzle, I stayed home and kept my coffee table company for a couple of days. But eventually I remembered a lecture that my doctor had given me a few years ago. I had been considering a walking program at that time, too, and had complained about potentially walking in the potentially nasty weather. My doctor advised me that, having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I should by now have figured out how to manage in the rain. She had suggested (rather sardonically) that I buy a rain hat and get on with my life. Tough love, I guess.

Three years later, I have followed her suggestion. I got my walks in on two days by going to the malls and searching the stores for just the right hat. I settled on a black and red reversible number from Eddie Bauer. The red kind of matches my stretchy band that’s tied to my coffee table. Maybe that’s what drew me to it.

So I have my snazzy new rain hat and I’m all ready to take on the elements and venture back out into the neighborhood. My doctor will be proud. My coffee table will just have to get over it.Now if it would only rain again.

My former husband loved flying. While still married, I wrote an article about his “aviation addiction,” mostly tongue-in-cheek. I was glad he had an avocation that he could put his heart into. He passed away in 2011, doing what he loved to do: flying. Adapted from an article I wrote in November, 1991:My Life with an Aviation Addict

I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that my husband is an incurable “aviation addict.” Since Oprah and Geraldo haven’t covered this topic yet, I’ll share with you my exclusive first-person account of how I learned to deal with this unique affliction.

Before I married, I vowed I would never be a weekend widow. I had heard war stories about “football fanatic” husbands, whose wives were perpetually awaiting the end of football season to get their attention long enough to tell them the car broke down or that child number three needed braces. Nope, I told myself, I’d find someone whose interests extended beyond the pro bowls.No one warned me about “aviation addicts” however. When I met my future husband, he was charming, dashing, debonair… and to add a touch of mystique, he was a pilot. Sure, he liked football, but he’d rather hang out at the airport than vegetate on the couch watching slow-motion replays. I’d never been around airplanes much before, so it seemed incredibly romantic. On our first vacation together we drove across Oregon, hopping from one airport to the next, inspecting any airplane that might conceivably come up for sale in our lifetime. I couldn’t tell you who was quarterbacking for the Seattle Seahawks that year, but I could rattle off the name of any aircraft broker in the western states.I thought I’d go nuts if I heard one more discussion on the virtues of a Lycoming engine versus a Continental, so when my husband finally found an older Piper Warrior that we could afford without having to hawk our firstborn, he bought it with my blessings.Now, I thought, this will get it out of his system. He can take a short jaunt in the Warrior whenever the urge strikes and the rest of the time we can be together at home; maybe watch a little football…Not true. If he wasn’t flying it, he was washing and waxing it. He could remember the date of the engine’s last inspection faster than he could recall our wedding anniversary date. It became obvious that the only way I could spend time with my husband was at the airport. I had to find an interest that meshed with his.

“What about wing-walking?” I teased, just to get his attention.“On my Warrior? No way. You’d scratch the paint when you fell off.” Was the honeymoon over or what?

“Okay, then, how about aerial photography?” I’d seen where people buy aerial photos of their homes, farms or businesses. I could spend time flying with my husband and make money, too.We took a practice flight. My husband circled some farms while I snapped away with the camera. When the film was developed, we had 24 color glossies of the airplane’s right wingtip. Although my husband admired them (they showed off his nice wax job), we decided they just wouldn’t sell to the general public.

Well, then, I’d try navigation. My husband convinced me that it would not only be fun, but it would help him out as well. We took a trip up the Oregon-Washington coastline and I pored over the charts as he pointed out specific landmarks below and their corresponding location on the map. Easy peasy.Then he turned inland. This wasn’t so easy. On the coast I at least knew which ocean we were over, but now I couldn’t tell one river from another. The only time I really knew where we were was when we landed at the Independence air field, because I could read the name painted in huge lettering on the runway.

Navigating wasn’t going to be the answer to my dilemma, either.I was beginning to envy those weekend widows of football season. If they wanted to talk to their husbands, all they had to do was wait for a commercial break. I had to take the laundry outside and use it to spell out messages on the lawn.

I took a part time job at the local airport, answering the Unicom radio and pumping aviation fuel. I did see more of my husband (he waved whenever he taxied by), but relaying airport advisories to him over the radio wasn’t my idea of intimate conversation.

Finally I took an introductory flying lesson. I had tried everything but piloting, I thought. Maybe I would discover that I loved it as much as my husband did… maybe even more than football.Within ten minutes of climbing into the cockpit alongside my instructor, I found myself careening at 60 miles per hour down a seemingly pencil-thin and all-too-short runway in a very expensive piece of machinery. No big deal, except that supposedly I was in control.

Just as I began to calculate the cost of replacing the runway lights I was about to overrun, the instructor rescued us and lifted the plane to momentary safety.Then began a lesson on coordinating turns. The instructor shoved one rudder pedal forward to demonstrate its effect on the airplane. The nose of the aircraft veered sharply to one side, and my stomach lurched responsively in the other direction. The procedure was repeated with the other rudder pedal. By then I was green with something other than envy, and the only technique I wanted demonstrated was a speedy landing.But, you know, it was kind of fun at that. Maybe the “aviation addiction” was creeping up on me all along. All I know is that I’m going back for more. And this fall, if anyone stops by our house to catch the Seahawks game, they’ll probably find the tube tuned in to an aviation ground school video instead.

# # #That actually was my one and only flying lesson. I turned to more artistic endeavors. I took acrylic painting lessons (painting aerial scenes) and stained glass (making my husband a glass panel of an airplane), and writing aviation articles for regional publications (my husband served as resident expert advisor). Occasionally, we watched football together.

While many (probably over a hundred million) people tuned in to the Super Bowl game today, ate junky “party” food and drank copious amounts of their favorite canned/ bottled/ on tap beverage, I spent a rather quiet afternoon with my daughter. Instead of watching dancing cheerleaders on a plasma screen, we watched dancing flames in a fireplace. Instead of yelling at referees about miscalled fouls, we conversed amiably about all sorts of other things. And instead of eating buffalo wings and nachos…well, okay, we did eat nachos.

I’m not going to start bashing football, but I wonder if I really missed much. I mean, I already heard Beyoncé sing at the presidential inauguration (it was her voice, whether she lip-synched or not), so I could skip the halftime show. And I don’t watch enough television to be a connoisseur of finer commercial breaks, so the special advertisements would have been lost on me. And I didn’t watch any pre-bowl football this year at all, so I couldn’t even legitimately pick a team to root for.

I am intrigued, however, by what I found online about “Super Bowl Monday,” and the push to make the day following Super Bowl Sunday a national holiday. Apparently the premise is that many of the millions of Super Bowl celebrants will not feel up to going to work on Monday, so in honor of this nationwide hangover, we should all be able to take the day off. There is even a petition floating around to encourage the president to declare such a holiday. An article at Buford.patch.com states that as of today, there are about 13,000 signatures out of the 86,665 required to have the petition considered. I guess I wouldn’t mind having another paid (it would be paid, right?) holiday. I wonder what Hallmark would do for cards. Maybe you would open the card and out would pop a couple of Alka Seltzer tablets. You certainly wouldn’t want noisemakers or party poppers. It would have to be a rather subdued holiday, I would think.

In the event that the petition goes through, maybe I should prepare to cash in on this, come up with some Super Bowl carols to copyright. Let’s see… what rhymes with quarterback? Saddle pack, cul-de-sac, cataract, knick knack… this may take a while.

Welcome!

About me and this blog: Having suffered at the hands of my own negativity for far too long, I decided it was time to claim the positive energy that is available to each of us for our own benefit and for the benefit of others. Hence, I've begun the process of "lifting the weight" of depression from my soul and moving into a lighter, freer space. Please join me in finding a way to a more balanced, affirming life.